‘Sherlock’s’ Steven Moffat Says Government Pulling BBC Funding Would Be ‘Vandalism of the Worst Kind’

Steven Moffat ripped the British government Saturday during “Sherlock’s” TCA panel, calling the potential for the BBC’s pulled public funding “vandalism of the worst kind.”

“I think what’s going on is outrageous. It’s absolutely terrible and wrong and ill conceived,” Moffat told a Beverly Hilton ballroom full of TV critics. “It staggers me that we’ve got a government [that] got elected, and decided that the main problem with Britain is our national broadcasting. Does anybody think that?”

“They must have something more important to do,” he continued. “The trouble is, it’s an oddity — the BBC — to say the least. It’s an extraordinary oddity that it’s so good. You don’t ordinarily have a national broadcaster that is that amazing.”

The British government is currently considering yanking public funding from the famed BBC, instead potentially insisting on a subscription fee to keep the TV model specifically afloat. The radio arm is more likely to stay focused on public programming and thus less likely to be abandoned by the government.

On why he’s setting what PBS will call Season 4 in Victorian London and no longer modern-day England, he joked: “Well, we checked the books and discovered we got it wrong.” Plus, more sincerely, ghost stories just work better in Victorian times, Moffat explained.

The writer called the olden-times version of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes “a lot less brattish … more polished; he operates like a Victorian gentleman instead of a posh, rude man.”

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